Rep. Derek
Kilmer, Chairman Rep. Tom Graves, Vice
Chair

Select Committee on the
Modernization of Congress

U.S. House
of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Re: Options
for Congressional Technology Modernization

Dear
Chairman Kilmer, Vice Chair Graves, and members of the committee:

On behalf of the undersigned group of civil society
organizations, we write to express our encouragement for
the tremendous work
you are undertaking to modernize Congress. To address the challenges of the 21st
century, we need
a Congress that
is empowered with
state-of-the art
technologies.

On a daily
basis, congressional offices
rely upon antiquated tools to manage
their legislative, oversight, and constituent-related responsibilities. Meanwhile, the demands
put on congressional resources have increased. In recent decades, the size and scope of government functions subject to oversight have
grown, and the average number of constituents per representative and
constituent-communications per representative have increased geometrically.

Since the birth
of the World Wide Web in 1989,
congressional capacity has
suffered significant
institutional decline — with total
legislative branch staffing decreasing by 27%.1
At the same time, incoming constituent
communications have soared.2 Over the
decades, these trends have undermined
essential policy and oversight functions while simultaneously shifting
scare resources towards political communications and constituent services.3

Besides growing
the number of congressional staff
to address this shortfall, we also can use
technology to improve the productivity of each staffer.
This can be done by adopting modern productivity software, improving digital
services infrastructure, and generally enhancing
the governance and incentives around information technology in Congress.4

Given the early stage of the Select Committee’s work, we hesitate to make prescriptive recommendations. Accordingly, what follows are a menu of options to explore during your first 90 days, accompanied by specific action items. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, and we hope it will be a useful resource to get you started. In addition, we include a framework of example

1 From 1989 to 2015. See: “Vital Statistics on Congress,” Brookings
Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalstats_ch5_tbl1.pdf.

2
For instance, constituent messages to the House through
its Communicating With
Congress API reached 28 million
communications in the
first year of the 116th
Congress, up from
9 million in 2016.

3 Daniel Schuman and Zach
Graves, “The Decline Of Congressional Expertise Explained In 10 Charts,”

Techdirt.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181018/10204640869/decline-congressional-expertise-explained-1 0-charts.shtml.

4
See, e.g., Zach
Graves and Ken Ward, “Doing
Business with Congress,” Lincoln Network, December 2018. https://joinlincoln.org/papers/doing-business-with-congress.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess whether
Congress is moving
in the right direction with respect to technology.

I.  MENU OF TECHNOLOGY IMPROVEMENTS

The following section offers analysis
and recommendations to pursue the following reforms,
which are designed to be actionable within
the next 90 days:

1. Improve Access
   to Legislative Information by Creating a Chief Data
   Officer and Expanding the Bulk Data
   Task Force
2. Support the Legislative Modernization Initiative
3. Establish a Public
   Information Advisory Committee for the Library
   of Congress
4. Improve Influence Disclosure for Lobbyists and Outside Witnesses
5. Explore Creating
   a Congressional Digital
   Service
6. Review and Improve Cybersecurity Practices
7. Review and Clarify House
   Open Source Policies
8. Ensure a Modernized Congress Is Accessible to All Americans
9. Increase Awareness and Skills to Make Use of Existing Resources

1. 
Improve Access
to Legislative Information by Creating a Chief Data
Officer and Expanding the Bulk Data Task Force

Chief Data Officer: Members
of Congress, their
support offices and agencies, as well as the general public rely on congressional data, but it is not always clear what information exists, where it can be found,
and what more can be done.

In recent years,
the legislative branch has made significant advances to release legislative
information to the public as data. This
has served Congress well, as it has facilitated Congress’s access to its own data,
both as raw structured data and as refined by third parties.
These efforts have included
the online publishing of bills; committee schedules, documents, and videos; an
online House phone directory; CBO reports; the bills and amendments scheduled for a floor
vote in the House;
the Statement of Disbursements; the new joint
meetings calendar; as well as holding
regular meetings of the Bulk Data Task Force and the Legislative Data and
Transparency Conference. These efforts are welcome and encouraged. However,
given the complexity and distributed governance of information in Congress, it is helpful
to have a touchstone that can help facilitate a coordinated approach
to manage that data.

To address this,
Congress should create a Chief Data Officer with the responsibility for
tracking datasets released by the legislative branch; providing advice,
guidance, and encouragement to offices regarding the publication of legislative
branch information as data; and providing assistance to the public with finding
and obtaining legislative data. We encourage you to recommend to the House
that such a position should
be created and
its parameters hammered out by the relevant
parties.

Bulk Data Task Force: In 2013, Congress
established a Legislative Bulk Data Task
Force focused on the
question of determining whether Congress should
make the legislative data behind Congress’s information system, THOMAS and
LIS, available to the public as structured data. Ultimately the Task Force
recommended and GPO
implemented the publication of bill summary, status, and text information online as structured data.

Perhaps more importantly, the Task Force
— which brought
together many of the technology stakeholders inside
the legislative branch
as well as members of civil society
— continued to hold
public meetings on a quarterly basis as well
as innumerable Congress-only meetings. This led to
ongoing collaboration among
all the stakeholders that has changed
the culture of Congress and quietly led to many
technological advances concerning legislative operations and transparency. The Task
Force served as a platform for people inside
and outside Congress to develop innovative products and tools that
help Congress using
information released by Congress. Leadership of both parties have quietly
blessed this group’s
activities, allowing it to continue
over the years.

Congress should endorse
the collaboration of the Bulk
Data Task Force
and officially expand
its mission to become
the Congressional Data
Task Force. The legislative language establishing the Task Force focuses
on bulk access
to legislative data,
with bulk access
being one mechanism by which data can be published, and legislative data being narrowly construed to information only about bills. On its original
mission, the Task Force has surpassed expectations. An updated mission would formally
allow the Task
Force to look
at how data
is handled throughout the legislative
branch. It would allow it to expand
its scope beyond
bills and the data attendant to them. This would allow consideration of other legislative documents, the handling
of information used
for oversight, information used and published in responding to
constituents, and providing key insights about the operations of Congress itself.

Accordingly, we recommend that the Select
Committee endorse the work of the Bulk
Data Task Force, encourage the
Committee on House Administration and House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee to update the
legislative language establishing the Task Force
and to provide for its existence on an ongoing
basis, and encourage the collaboration of support offices and agencies across the legislative branch
with the Task Force.

2.  Support the Legislative Modernization Initiative

As part of the Legislative Modernization Initiative, the House has
been building technology to provide Members and
staff with rapid
access to the
impacts that proposed amendments have to an
underlying bill, and how proposed legislation would change
the law. When complete, this technology project offers to provide tremendous insights to Congress and the general
public concerning the effects
of proposed legislation. We recommend that you endorse
this aspect of the
Legislative
Modernization Initiative and
encourage the House
to put sufficient resources into

using technology to show in real time
how an amendment would change a bill and a proposed bill would change the
law.

3.  Establish a Public
Information Advisory Committee for the Library
of Congress

The Library
of Congress is proud of its reputation and role as the largest
library in the world. The Library plays an important role in
providing information about Congress to Congress and the general public (such
as through the website Congress.gov), but the Library — at least in our
experience — has not prioritized its role as a source
of data and is not in regular
contact with civil society, especially with those with
expertise in facilitating public access to congressional information. This is a missed opportunity.

Other legislative and executive branch
agencies and entities
regularly meet with
civil society stakeholders to share information and provide a foundation for collaboration. For example, the Legislative Branch
Bulk Data Task Force meets
quarterly concerning bulk access to congressional
data, the Advisory Committee on the Records
of Congress semi-annually convenes congressional
historians, and the Federal Depository
Library Council is an ongoing point of contact for depository libraries. In the executive branch, the FOIA Advisory Committee meets monthly as a
point of focus for FOIA practitioners and agency officials, the Archivist regularly meets regularly with civil
society, and so on.

To our knowledge, however, the Library
of Congress does
not have any regular mechanism by which it convenes public and internal stakeholders to share
information on its legislative information activities. We recommend that such
an advisory body be established with broad internal and external stakeholder representation that would
hold regular public
meetings where a productive interchange can take place.
Accordingly, we urge that you recommend the creation of a
Library of Congress Public Information Advisory Committee.

4.  Improve Influence Disclosure for Lobbyists and Outside Witnesses

The House
requires lobbyists and
witnesses before Congress to disclose information as part of its
ethics regime, but does an inadequate job of releasing that information in a
way that actually empowers decision-makers and the public to evaluate conflicts
of interest. The House should address how lobbyist and witness disclosures are
released by requiring the publishing of that information as data.

Lobbyists: The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act requires the filing of regular reports with the Clerk of the House
concerning lobbying activities. Some reports are filed by individual
lobbyists, other reports are filed by the entities that they work for. Because
of the way that lobbyists file, it can be difficult to track lobbyists who work for
multiple entities at the same
time or over the
course of their
career.

Lobbyists can be tracked
by how they type in their names. It is not unusual,
however, for lobbyist names to be represented in
different ways. At different times a form field identifying a lobbyist could be filled out
as “Joan Smith,”
“Joan S. Smith,”
“Joan Samantha Smith,”
as well as containing
various typographical errors,
omissions, and name
changes. All lobbyists receive unique identifiers

for each chamber
— a series of letters
and numbers that
belong only to that lobbyist
and is maintained by the House
or Senate — but that
information is not
currently used to verify or track
an individual lobbyist’s identity in a public-facing way. The House
of Representatives should publish that data field
— the unique identifier — alongside all
the other data
fields it already releases. The Select Committee should encourage the House Administration Committee to direct the Clerk
to make this
happen.

Witness Disclosure Reports: House of Representatives Rule
XI, clause 2, subsection (g)(5)
requires witnesses appearing in a nongovernmental capacity before a committee to disclose any Federal
grants or contracts, or contracts or payments originating with a foreign
government, received during the
current calendar year
or either of the two
previous calendar years
by the witness
or by any entity
represented by the
witness and related
to the subject
matter of the
hearing. It also defines what specifically must be disclosed, and requires those
statements must be made publicly available in electronic form with appropriate redactions no later
than one day after the witness
appears.

Congressional committees in implementing this
language are using
PDF forms to gather the information and post it on their
individual committee webpages. While there has been an improvement in the move
to digital forms
to create these
PDFs, it is still insufficient to meet the purpose of the rule,
which is to track when
witnesses who are testifying before
Congress have received money
from foreign governments. The information disclosed in the House-wide form should be gathered in a structured data format and be made
available to the
public in an online
searchable, sortable, downloadable database that can be tracked
by witness, the organization they represent,
and the contract or grant they have received. This central database will
fulfill the purpose of the original rule.
The Select Committee should encourage the House Administration Committee to direct the Clerk to disclose information gathered in witness
disclosure forms in a
central database.

5.  Explore Creating a Congressional Digital
Service

The demands upon Congress have increased geometrically, but the institution has cut its own
capacity and relies on technology ill-suited to meet those demands. In part,
this is because governance of and
resources for technology are diffused throughout the institution. This
could be addressed by creating a digital team
dedicated to building
a twenty-first century
Congress that identifies and
tackles the big, institution-wide problems and works with stakeholders inside
Congress to help tackle them.

Congress needs
a constantly evolving set of tools and technologies to continue to operate as a
world class legislative body. There
is a bipartisan proposal to create such
a digital service,
modeled after the executive branch’s 18F and U.S. Digital Service,
proposed by Reps. Steny Hoyer and Kevin McCarthy. The Select Committee should
explore implementing a solution like the Congressional Digital Service by holding hearings
and engaging with
civil society experts.

6.  Review and Improve Cybersecurity Practices

Members of Congress, their staff, and support offices
and agencies are subject to ongoing and persistent cybersecurity threats. Congress created
the Senators’ Personal
Cybersecurity Working Group, which issued
a non-public report
towards the end
of last year,
as well as directing the Senate Sergeant at Arms to devote
resources to Office Cybersecurity.5 The House Chief Administrative Officer reported CAO blocked over
the course of a month
1.6 billion unauthorized scans and 12.6 million
questionable emails.6 It is our belief
that there is insufficient protection for the non-official side
of members of Congress and staff — their personal email accounts, phones, Facebook pages, etc. In addition, these
aspects traditionally have been viewed
as out of scope by Congress’s cybersecurity teams because
of how they
interpret the law.

We recommend that
the Select Committee ask the House General Counsel, in conjunction with CRS, to provide a review of the laws,
regulations, and internal
policies and practices that may be viewed as preventing the use of
cybersecurity measures to protect the non-official accounts of Members and
staff. We further recommend that the Select Committee review existing
cybersecurity measures and request a new GAO or House IG review
of institutional cybersecurity practices. This
study should review
protection of non-official accounts, especially those
regularly used in the performance of congressional duties, and generate
a set of recommendations for protecting those accounts in a way that would not
impair the efforts of congressional staff to perform their duties. To the extent
practical, this study
should also include
a comparative analysis of how congressional
cybersecurity compares with that of — or falls short of — industry best
practices.

7.  Review and Clarify
House Open Source
Policies

Aside from off-the-shelf products that have been approved
under the normal
review process, the use and development of free and open source
software in Congress has been unduly
constrained. Having a permissive open source policy
is important because
it allows Congress to participate in a
broader software development ecosystem. In
addition, it allows the public to iterate on technology developed by the government. It also is a living
demonstration of an ethos of openness
and innovation inside
the legislative branch.

For Congress specifically, there are three
sets of interrelated issues. First, to what extent
may Members of Congress or congressional staff
communicate regarding felt
needs for software? For example, may they communicate regarding bugs, feature
requests, or software they wish to see
developed? Second, to what extent
may congressional offices
use open source
software developed elsewhere or collaborate on software development? And finally, to what extent
may congressional offices publish or release code developed inside
Congress?

5 See, e.g., S. Rept. 115-274.

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/115th-congress/senate-report/274/1.

6
See: CAO Philip
G. Kiko’s testimony before the House
Appropriations Legislative Branch
Subcommittee, March 2019.

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP24/20190312/109069/HHRG-116-AP24-Wstate-KikoP-2019031
2.pdf.

As
the House rules
are murky concerning the use of official resources, the Committee on House
Administration, in conjunction with the House
Ethics Committee and whatever other
bodies are appropriate, should
promulgate guidelines concerning the use of open source
software.

Just like in the executive branch, which has a source
code policy and publishes code
online at code.gov,7 Congress should
adopt a bias towards openness. It should also consider policies
that mitigate the risks of being locked
in to proprietary systems and formats. Moreover, there is the potential for significant financial savings arising from the reuse
of code across
multiple entities.

8.  Ensure a Modernized Congress Is Accessible to all Americans

On the 50th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act,
the Census Bureau
estimated that the civilian noninstitutionalized population with
a disability in the United
States at 40.7
million people.8 Just as the Congress has ensured that its physical
edifices must be accessible to all
constituents, the digital
infrastructure that the institution creates
should be open
and accessible to all.

While structuring legislative data will have
a salutary effect
on making text and statistics open to all, Congress should take care
that the growing
adoption and use of social
media, live streaming, and other emerging technologies that Members and
Committees are using
to share information and engage
the public are accessible to all. In practice, that will mean
measures like adding
closed captioning for the hearing
impaired to videos
or text transcripts for audio-visual content.
Popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook
and YouTube all have features
that enable offices and committees to annotate images and videos
or create transcripts.

Where such accessibility features don’t exist
within the apps
or services of today, or the emerging technologies of the future,
Members and Committees should ensure that
accessible content is always posted on their
websites. And consequently, the Office of Compliance should
be charged with identifying best
practices and evaluating compliance with those
practices.

9.  Increase Awareness and Skills to Make Use of Existing
Resources

As the scope and complexity of legislative and oversight duties
have increased, substantive resources to help Congress
do its job have not kept pace,
leaving lawmakers and staffers
increasingly dependent on think tanks,
advocates, and the media for information.

Many staffers and lawmakers are unaware or not
equipped to make use of the numerous information resources that are available to them. For example, the Library of Congress has a
contract with the mapping and spatial data
analytics company, ESRI,
making valuable data
and mapping tools available to all of Congress. These
capabilities, in the hands of properly trained
staff,

7 “Memorandum for the Heads of Departments and Agencies,” M-16-21,
U.S. Chief Information Office. https://sourcecode.cio.gov/.

8
“Anniversary of Americans With Disabilities Act:
July 26, 2018,”
U.S. Census Bureau,
June 6, 2018. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2018/disabilities.html.

would allow a committee to produce district-by-district maps
of current conditions relevant to an area
of inquiry before
a hearing and to monitor
changes over time.

As the executive branch proceeds with
implementation of the
DATA Act and
the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, there will
be increasing opportunity and need for Congress to incorporate data
and evidence into
the policymaking and oversight process.

We recommend that
you ask the Library of Congress to undertake an inventory of resources
available to Congress, with an emphasis on technological resources. This inventory should
inform an upskilling strategy to offer relevant training for congressional staff in conjunction with the
Congressional Academy. The
committee should consider a certificate program
for staffers who acquire relevant skills, to allow these
to be considered in hiring
and promotion decisions.

II.   A METRICS-ORIENTED FRAMEWORK FOR MODERNIZING CONGRESS’S IT

We believe that
the menu of options included above would help
the Select Committee make a strong start
on technology-related issues.
It is by no means
a complete list of technology-related improvements, and
it is focused on items
that are actionable within the next
90 days.

We recommend that
the committee additionally develop metrics to be used
not just over 90 days but potentially over the next decade
to determine whether
technological modernization in the
legislative branch is moving in the right
direction. Modernization must have demonstrable value — this is how
we can figure
out whether we are succeeding and what items
provide the greatest return on investment. We have put together the following framework, based on creating
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
for different problem
areas, as a starting point.
By no means is there only
one way to evaluate progress, or that these
KPIs are the
right ones to select.
But we hope this
will put you down the right path
to develop metrics
of your own.

Although the
use of KPIs
is ubiquitous across
large organizations, the
framework is somewhat complex and we welcome the opportunity to discuss it in greater
depth.

We
look forward to working with you as this process unfolds.

Sincerely,

Zach Graves,

Head of Policy, Lincoln Network

Daniel Schuman

Policy Director, Demand Progress

Joshua Tauberer President, GovTrack.us

John Wonderlich

Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation

Kevin Kosar

Vice President of Policy, R Street Institute

Marci Harris CEO, POPVOX

David Eaves

Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School

Alexander B.
Howard Founder, E-PluribusUnum.org

Robert Cook-Deegan

Professor,
Arizona State University

Matt Glassman

Lecturer, Claremont-McKenna
College

Grayson Kinsella

Chair,
Public Policy Committee, Quorum

Michele Stockwell

Executive
Director, BPC Action

Joseph Nelson

Managing Director, ROC AUC, LLC;
Founder, Represently

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